St Peter's Fair itself is older than the Pretty Maid by more than two hundred years. King James the First granted Holsworthy its charter in 1614, giving the town the right to hold a fair in the saint's name. Every year, on the first morning, the town crier proclaims that charter aloud — standing on a brass plaque set into the road of Stanhope Square. The plaque marks the spot where the Great Tree of Holsworthy once stood, a landmark vast enough to give its name to the meeting place beneath it. The tree itself is long gone, but the place remains, and the crier still shouts King James's words into a square of modern shops as though no time has passed at all.

The name Holsworthy is a thousand-year-old fossil. It started as Heald's worthig — Heald being a Saxon farmer or chieftain whose name we will never know more about, worthig being his enclosed farmstead. The Domesday Book of 1086 records it as Haldeword. By 1228 it had become Haldwwurth. The medieval scribes worked through Haldeswrthy, Holdesworthe, Healdesworthe, Hyallesworthi, and finally settled on Houlsworthy by 1675, before someone tidied the spelling once more. Each variation is a small archaeological layer in the way the name was spoken aloud over centuries by people who could neither read nor write it, but who knew exactly where they meant.

Until 2014, Holsworthy was home to one of the largest livestock markets in the South West of England, held on the same site for over a century since 1905. Farmers brought their cattle, sheep and pigs into the centre of town every Wednesday morning. The market eventually outgrew its constraints — the town centre wasn't quite the right place for what had become a major commercial operation — and the site was sold for retail and housing while the auction moved to the edge of town. What remains is the weekly Pannier Market, the older indoor market for everything else, a tradition that predates the cattle market by centuries and still runs every Wednesday in the heart of the town.

Just outside Holsworthy sits something that looks unremarkable from the road and is one of the more interesting energy experiments in the country. The Holsworthy anaerobic digester is the only centralised slurry-to-biogas facility in the United Kingdom. Local dairy farmers send their cattle waste here; the plant ferments it, captures the methane, and burns it to generate 2.1 megawatts of electricity. Proposals exist to pipe the residual heat into the town itself, so that the same cows that produce the milk Holsworthy was built on might one day also heat its houses. It is a strange and modern echo of the medieval cycle, in which everything from a farm went back to the farm.

The parish church of St Peter and St Paul keeps two unusual artefacts from the Second World War. POW Camp Number 42 stood at what is now Stanhope Close, on the edge of town, holding German and later Italian prisoners. The Italian prisoners built themselves a Roman Catholic chapel inside one of the camp huts, and when they had no proper stained glass they painted glass by hand — religious scenes in pastel colours, lit by ordinary daylight, made by men far from home and uncertain when they would see it again. Those painted windows now hang in the parish church. A German prisoner carved a crucifix from wood, which the church also keeps. The men who made these things were enemies of the British state when they made them. Decades after the war they were welcomed back to see their work still in place, in a building they had probably never expected to revisit.

Barbara Mandell retired to Holsworthy and died here in 1998, but in 1955 she had been the first woman in Britain to read a national television news bulletin — for the brand new commercial broadcaster ITV, which launched on the 22nd of September that year. The BBC took another five years to catch up. Mandell read the lunchtime news on ITN, wrote travel books, then moved to this quiet Devon market town for the last years of her life. The local memory of her presence is fainter than her place in television history, but she lies in the parish she chose to retire to, less than a mile from the doorway through which a different Pretty Maid is still announced each July.